Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!

https://www.tessellationgames.com/

Some mathematicians worked out a way to fairly do districting, similar to having one kid cut the cake and the other kid gets first choice:

"A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes" by Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, Dingli Yu https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781

I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:

> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.

This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.

    We're three siblings from a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas, and this is the story of how we designed a board game about gerrymandering — and ended up at the Supreme Court with 82 copies of Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.

The number of voting members has been strictly capped at 435 since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.

In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep. In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep. At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.

I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.

Lovely game! Takes a bit of fiddling to get the hang of it, but so do most puzzles worth doing. The instructions are clear, the presentation is great and I like the decision to prioritise a fun game over representing real Gerrymandering accurately. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this.

I do believe the solution to gerrymandering in general is to move towards proportional representation so that the individual boundaries of a distinct are not as influential.

Maybe add that as an option to the game?

I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.

I love the idea .. how you changed an important issue into a game and probably that would bring awareness. I am not an expert but such decisions probably affect a lot of people and no one spend time and learn about it. This is a fun way to learn. Thank you !!

From a didactic perspective, it would cool if the result-screen illustrated how some voting-reform would have solved the sneaky win... but I guess that's not practical, since it'd rely on additional data which would detract from the ludic experience.

For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.

I think I did not understand this game well. May I suggest adding a few introductory levels of increasing difficulty for beginners.

This felt very satisfying to win! (Day 39) I'll try to remember to keep coming back.

I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.